Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Michael Ciesielski and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net SOME TURNS OF THOUGHT IN MODERN PHILOSOPHY _Five Essays_ BY GEORGE SANTAYANA NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1933 Published under the auspices of THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF LITERATURE PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN CONTENTS I. Locke and the Frontiers of Common Sense page 1 Paper read before the Royal Society of Literature on the occasion of the Tercentenary of the birth of John Locke. With some Supplementary Notes II. Fifty Years of British Idealism 48 Reflections on the republication of Bradley's _Ethical Studies_ III. Revolutions in Science 71 Some Comments on the Theory of Relativity and the new Physics IV. A Long Way Round to Nirvana 87 Development of a suggestion found in Freud's _Beyond the Pleasure Principle_ V. The Prestige of the Infinite 102 A review of Julien Benda's _Sketch of a consistent theory of the relations between God and the World_ The Author's acknowledgments are due to the Editors of _The New Adelphi_, _The Dial_, and the _Journal of Philosophy_, in which one or more of these Essays originally appeared. I LOCKE AND THE FRONTIERS OF COMMON SENSE[1] A good portrait of Locke would require an elaborate background. His is not a figure to stand statuesquely in a void: the pose might not seem grand enough for bronze or marble. Rather he should be painted in the manner of the Dutch masters, in a sunny interior, scrupulously furnished with all the implements of domestic comfort and philosophic enquiry: the Holy Bible open majestically before him, and beside it that other revelation--the terrestrial globe. His hand might be pointing to a microscope set for examining the internal constitution of a beetle: but for the moment his eye should be seen wandering through the open window, to admire the blessings of thrift and liberty manifest in the people so worthily busy in the market-place, wrong as many a monkish notion might be that still troubled their poor heads. From them his enlarged thoughts would easily pass to the stout carved ships in the river beyond, intrepidly setting sail for the Indies, or for savage America. Yes, he too had travelled, and not only in thought. He knew how many strange nations and false religions lodged in this round earth, itself but a speck in the universe. There were few ingenious authors that he had not perused, or philosophical instruments that he had not, as far as possible, examined and tested; and no man better than he could understand and prize the recent discoveries of "the incomparable Mr Newton". Nevertheless, a certain uneasiness in that spare frame, a certain knitting of the brows in that aquiline countenance, would suggest that in the midst of their earnest eloquence the